Copyright is important to protect content creators. That’s not a problem in itself, however some of the proposals that governments have come up with over the years to help protect and enforce copyright have gone way too far.
The EU copyright reforms have been under discussion for several years and while the “spirit” of the reforms should be welcomed, there are some fundamentally flawed and dangerous proposals being pushed within them. This, unfortunately, isn’t “news” and we’ve mentioned this debate in the past (yes, that was 3 years ago!)
Earlier this year the European Parliament pushed back on some of the proposed text, but it’s up for review and a new vote again this week.
This video (which contains some strong language) summarises a lot of the issues with the current proposals, proposals that go simply go too far and would essentially break the internet by forcing it to be heavily filtered and lead to a lot of headaches for users:
So what can you do?
If you think the proposals are flawed then you can take action by contacting your MEPs and asking them to vote against them.
If you’re in Ireland there’s more information here. For other EU countries you can navigate to the respective country page here.
God the tone of that ad is a bit UKIP-y isn’t it? I’ve seen both sides of this argued in my liberal echo-chamber recently which is unusual but I haven’t been able to get a handle on the arguments from either side. I think the only way to keep on top of all the issues is to become an MEP. I’ll read up a bit more!
Allan
Well it caught your attention, didn’t it? 🙂
Julia Reda and others have been talking about the issues with the proposals for a long time: https://juliareda.eu/en/
As I said in the blog post, protecting copyright isn’t the problem – it’s the “how” that worries a lot of people.
Michele